WASHINGTON TALK: BRIEFING

WASHINGTON TALK: BRIEFING; Display Oswald's Rifle?

Published: March 18, 1987

The forthcoming 25th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy has raised some suggestions that the National Archives put on public display various items related to his death - Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle and diary, the President's blood-stained shirt, the bullet that is believed to have killed him. But the Government remains highly solicitous of Kennedy's memory.

''There's an unspoken consensus in attitude that prevails,'' said Marion M. Johnson, the man in day-to-day charge of several hundred file boxes and crates of material gathered by the Warren Commission, which investigated the November 1963 assassination. The items are available only to researchers upon special application.

Other material, like the autopsy report and X-rays, can be inspected only with the permission of a Kennedy family representative, Burke Marshall, a law professor at Yale University.

Mr. Johnson says the family has never made a formal request that the items not be displayed, but some think the election of one of Kennedy's nephews, Joseph P. Kennedy 2d, to Congress has made any shift in National Archives policy less likely to occur anytime soon. John F. Kennedy would have turned 70 years old this May.